check out website: www.orionbooks.co.uk t'T is a utopia - all pain, illness and negative emotion are controlled and tempered by the nanotechs that coarse through the bloodstream of every t'T human being. All except one - Ae, an anomaly in t'T, someone who doesn't seek his thrills by travelling from planet to planet or by modifying his body but from murder. Psychopathic murder.  He has been caught and is held in an impenetrable prison but is offered a deal by mysterious voices in his head, freedom in exchange for the apparently motiveless murder of an entire plane.
He accepts and Adam Roberts uses this story to explore what it means to be a conscious being and quantum physics If this sounds like a serious issue to be explored then you are right - the ideas behind this novel force their way past the words and past the story to be at the forefront of this novel. There is no doubt that this is a book designed to make you think. At times, I felt like a removal man carrying new ideas up to my brain having to pause frequently due to the size of the load. It also means that the novel's tone is as dispassionate and calculating as the character of Ae, there is no in-depth connection with any characters. In this way I felt that it was similar to Margaret Atwood's speculative fiction; a dispassionate look at what could be. It read like a scientist observing an experiment, which he set up, through the objectivity of a microscope. That isn't to say I disliked this novel, it's more that there was no emotional hook on which to catch my interest on. Katie McGivern |
